Tweet Tweet
I have been resisting the tempation to create my own profile on Twitter over the past few months, however today I finally caved in. As a web designer, for some reason I am against all of these quick and easy fill out a form type websites – such as Facebook, Myspace, Bebo and the list seems to continue to grow.
If I look back a few years ago, I was resisting to sign up to all of those social networking websites at one point or another, but eventually was overcome by peer pressure and just had to sign up against my will. I actually started coding my own blog type website before I just decided to go the easy route and use WordPress. Now I don’t even code my own theme – how times have changed.
I figured why would I want to jump on the social bandwagon when I can just create my own website that can host my own photos (Flickr), my own videos (YouTube), my own blogs (WordPress), and my friend’s comments (Facebook) - and best of all it was designed by me and only me. Though if my own idea was so great and a few years earlier, I’d be typing an entirely different post right now. However I am sure I had an idea similar to YouTube back in 1998!
The reason why I decided to create a Twitter profile was purely to network in order to increase the traffic to my blog – just so you all know! It actually is a very good tool, and I love the fact that if I am too busy blog, I can just send an update via SMS. For example, I will be overseas for a week at the end of July, so you all will have to rely on my short and sweet updates for a few days.
Twitter – Social networking and microblogging service utilising instant messaging, SMS or a web interface.
As part of the registration process, Twitter asks you to enter your e-mail address and it will go through your address book to search for your friends who have a Twitter profile. It came back with one person – an old high school teacher of mine who taught my computer class and actually influenced my online and IT ‘career’. Now either I do not have enough friends or they just aren’t IT savvy enough to care or even know about Twitter – I think the latter and I made it my mission to at least help sign a few of them up.
So if you have not already created your Twitter profile, you should! It is a very useful tool to build online relationships with your friends, audience and other bloggers - and don’t forget to follow me!
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Wow, it really is a connected world. So you join Twitter, let it go through your address book, find an ex-teacher on Twitter (uh, that would be me), and follow them. Twitter notifies me through Gmail, so I add you back, then follow the link to your blog and add you to my RSS reader. It’s weird how this stuff works, but it does work.
Great to hear from you Daniel!
You’re right about the migration to social tools. I remember the first time I used pbwiki.com to knock up a quick website and thinking I would never bother coding another webpage from scratch again. These Web2 tools just make it all so easy and with all the prewritten APIs to glue everything together, it makes a very compelling case to give in to it all (even if it is just a little bit) Makes it hard to justify writing your own blogging software when things like WordPress are so darn good.
Glad to have you on the Twitter, and nice to catch you online.
There is no hiding from anyone anymore! Not even old students who come back to haunt you years later (our first VC project was 10 years ago!).
Good to hear from you and thanks for the comments!